As a child, you had a translucent wisp of blond that seemed to float. An uncorrected blue gaze, eyes shiny as opals.

You were a handsome teenager, ten years before I met you.

From the kitchen, I looked into the sunken living room.

You rubbed your rifles over and over, a white cloth flagging itself against the barrel.

Your mother beamed. Such a clean boy.

Do you see me?

An arsenal is three or more guns. You had eleven.

They were kept in the basement on their own wire scaffolding shelf.

I let you fuck me on that stone-colored carpeting with the disembodied parts of the rifle spread next to us.

X

Somewhere, this year, a cop tells a room full of trainees You will never have sex as good as just after you’ve killed a man.

This job comes with few perks.

Take what you can get.

Somewhere, this year, a woman enters a store and asks to buy a gun for self-defense. We can’t sell you a gun, the man behind the counter says, but we can sell you a rifle.

For hunting.

The AR-15 assault rifle and its variants have been used in every American mass shooting since Columbine. You put this gun in my arms and told me to shoot.

It was easy to love. From my hands sprung a rapid swarm of bullets humming like bees. The injection port pumping.

Inside me, a pumping to match.

X

In Chicago, you kept a Colt .22 in a square platinum case under your bed. I was sitting above it when you said I love you. Then, I know you love me too.

I replied with nothing.

This was the same nothing I give to men who shout down my ass from across the street.

It took us sixteen hours total to drive to and from Des Moines. You picked the music the entire time. When you were in the driver’s seat of my Honda, riding up against the back bumper of the car in front of us, blaring on the horn, I remember thinking I was about to die. In the lane next to us, the driver of a semi stared down at me, scowling, inching his hubcaps toward my door.

Nothing but empty plains, cottonwoods bursting with leaves, and night around us.

X

On our first date, we sat on the roof of the autoshop next door to your flat. We sipped grenades of Mickey’s. While solving the pictograms in the bottlecaps, we were interrupted by the faint bursts of explosions echoing from a nearby alley.

That one’s a firecracker, you said.

That one’s a gunshot.

The night my best friend, Erick, raped me, I had told him I planned to break up with you. I told him about the Iowa trip, how you expected me to say love, how I forced myself to smile so often it felt like I was cracking my teeth against a heavy stone.

He kissed my cheek and told me he loved me only hours before violating my body in the dark.

I should have told him about the gun range. My crack shot.

I often have dreams of killing Erick in public. I strip him naked. Call him rapist. Shame him for his fat, round back.

People watch. Sometimes they try to stop me and fail.

I take his skull in my hands and smash it against whatever surface is closest: the edge of a table, a concrete curb.

My fingers pull tighter around his curls, squishing between the widening pangea of his fragmented skull.

The morning after the rape, I called you. You took me to the hospital but stayed in the waiting room. You said you had a fear of hospitals.

You said, If I had been there, I might have fought him.

Might meaning maybe.

X

What came next was a series of no’s you pushed back against.

X

Once, you fucked my placid body until I sobbed.

X

Once, I asked you to stop touching me and you refused.

X

Once, I told you I planned to kill myself and you started crying.

X

I stayed with you, somehow.

X

I needed another bed.

X

While you slept next to me, the wretchedness I felt made me think of the semi-automatic underneath us, pillowed by soft dark sponges in its platinum case.

X

This was the first gun you introduced to me at the range. The most important for me to know. For protection.

X

It was the loudest gun.

X

It hurt my hands.

X

Each shot spat hot soot onto my fingers.

X

Some of the bullets made the wood around the target frizz.

X

Most landed in the paper figure’s middle. Shred the carbon to oblivion.

X

Brain.

X

Heart.

X

Lungs.

X

Intestines.

X

I pictured the gun in my hands.

X

My legs over the side of the bed.

X

Barrel pressing into my forehead.

X

You sleeping beside me.

X

In my mind, I played the sound of its firing.

X

A sonic boom.

X

Neighbors for blocks, listening

X

firecracker

X

X

Stephanie Lane Sutton was born in Detroit. Her poetry and prose has recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Crab Fat Magazine, SWWIM, and the Puritan. She is a co-founding editor of |tap| lit mag and a Michener Fellow at the University of Miami, where she currently serves as Managing Editor of Sinking City. Previously, she lived in Chicago, where she was a teaching artist with After School Matters and a co-facilitator of Surviving the Mic.